Self Consciousness and the Self:

From Descartes to Kant

Rene Descartes
 Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
• French philosopher who is usually considered the
“father of modern philosophy”
• De Jesuit College of La Fléche
• Became skilled in the classics, law, and medicine
but decided these fell far short of proper
knowledge, and so he turned to modern science
and mathematics
• First book was a defense of Copernicus, which he
prudently did not publish
• Discovered, while still young, what we now
call “analytic geometry” and used this
discovery as a model for the rest of his career
• Basing the principles of philosophy and
theology on a similar mathematical basis, he
was able to develop a method in philosophy
that could be carried through according to
individual reason and that no longer
depended upon appeal to authorities whose
insights and methods were questionable
• In Discourse on Method (1637), he set out
these basic principles, which he had already
used in Meditations on First Philosophy (not
published until 1641), to reexamine the
foundations of philosophy
• He sought a basic premise from which, as in a
geometrical proof, he could deduce all those
principles that could be known with certainty
But what then am I? A thing which thinks. What is a
thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts,
understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which
also imagines and feels
—Descartes,
Meditations on First Philosophy

•Descartes knows that he exists and continues to

exist as long as he is a “thing that thinks”
•This consciousness that allows us to know that we
exist composes our soul, which is a substance
•For Descartes, self-identity depends on
consciousness
John Locke
 John Locke
• Spent early life in the English countryside
• Taught philosophy and the classics at Oxford
until he earned a medical degree and turned to
medicine
• Much of his mature life was spent in politics;
joined a group that was fighting for the
overthrow of the government
• Forced to flee England in 1683; lived in Holland
until the Glorious Revolution of 1688
• Received a government position but spent
most of his time writing his two Treatises on
Government (1689) to justify the revolution
and its political principles and defending his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690), which he had written while in exile
• Generally credited as not only the founder of
British empiricism but also the father of
modern political liberalism
• Self-identity depends on our having the same
consciousness and memories
• He distinguishes between a substance (the
soul) and consciousness
• Memory provides an infallible link between
what we might call different stages of a person
• Two objections:
1) We forget much of what we experience
2) Our memories are not always accurate
David Hume
 David Hume (1711-1776)
• Often admired as the outstanding genius of British
philosophy
• Born in Scotland (Edinburgh), where he spent much
of his life; he often traveled to London and Paris
• After a vacation in France, wrote the Treatise of
Human Nature (1739)
• Achieved notoriety as well as literary fame in his
lifetime, was involved in scandals, and was
proscribed by the Church
• Was refused professorships at the leading
universities for his “heresies” and yet was, by all
accounts, an utterly delightful man who never
lost his sense of humor
• Was “ the life of the party” in London, Edinburgh,
and Paris, and he had long set the standard of the
ideal thinker for British philosophers
• Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
Morals (1751) created as much of a stir in the
intellectual world as his Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding (1748)
• Like the book on human understanding, the book
on morality was a rewriting of his youthful
Treatise, which never received the attention it
deserved
• Hume’s thesis in moral philosophy was as
skeptical and shocking as his thesis in
epistemology:
– There is no knowledge of right and wrong and
no rational defense of moral principles
– These are based upon sentiment or feeling
and, as such, cannot be defended by argument
. . . I may venture to affirm of the rest of
mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or
collection of different perceptions, which
succeed each other with an inconceivable
rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and
movement
—David Hume,
A Treatise of Human Nature
Immanuel Kant
 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Life is the subjective condition of all our possible

experience; consequently we can only infer the
permanence of the soul in life, for the death of a
man is the end of all experience
—Immanuel Kant
• German philosopher, probably the greatest
philosopher since Plato and Aristotle, who lived in a
small town in East Prussia (Konigsburg)
• Was a professor at the university there for more than
thirty years; never married; his neighbors said that
his habits were so regular that they could set their
watches by him (a later German poet said, “It is hard
to write about Kant’s life, for he had no life”)
• Yet, from a safe distance, he was one of the most
persistent defenders of the French Revolution and, in
philosophy, created no less a revolution himself
• His philosophical system was embodied in three huge
volumes: Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of
Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment
(1790)
• He changed the thinking of philosophers as much as
the revolution changed France
• His central thesis was the defense of what he called
synthetic a priori judgments (moral and religious
equivalents) by showing their necessity for all human
experience
• In this way, he escaped from Hume’s skepticism and
avoided the dead-end intuitionism of his rational
predecessors
 Kant’s Transcendental Ego
• Kant agrees with Hume:
– Identity is not found in self-consciousness
– The enduring self is not an object of
experience; it is transcendental
• The self, for Kant, is also the activity of
applying the rules by which we organize our
experience.
• We must “synthesize” our experiences into a
unity, for we could not come to have any
knowledge otherwise
• He calls this the transcendental unity of
apperception
• The transcendental ego is basic and necessary
for all human experience
 Kant versus Descartes: Two Conceptions of
the Self
Kant objects to Descartes on three grounds:
1. Our concern with self-consciousness is given
impetus because we are not often self-conscious
2. Kant does not believe that the thinking self is a
thinking thing because the self is not in our
experience but rather responsible for it. The self
is an activity, which undermines the traditional
concept of the soul
3. Kant believes that we need two very different
conceptions of self. The first is that the
transcendental self is essential to being a self,
and the second is the idea of the empirical ego,
which includes all of those particular things that
make us different people. This allows us to
differentiate between particular selves
The End !